Corpse Eating Bees!?!?

Bees are Beneficial Little Beings

While some people may be fearful of bees, they are actually extremely beneficial beings in our ecosystems. These little buzzing creatures are fundamental to the pollination of their local habitats, can produce the liquid gold that is honey (depending on the particular species of bee), play an important role within the food chain, and some… even help corpses decompose.

Obligate Necrophages

Don’t worry! Most bees could care less about corpses and grotesque decay and instead just focus on buzzing from one flower to the next and making delicious honey. However, one subspecies of bees has evolved to help in the decomposition of mammalian bodies by consuming the remains.

Aptly named vulture bees, these little creatures make of three branches within the genus Trigona and can be found in the rainforest regions of Central and South America. Like their cousins the cute little honeybees, vulture bees also interact with one another socially and build collective hives. They are also fairly similar in appearance although they tend to be dark brown or black in color. What truly sets them apart from other bees is the fact that they are obligate necrophages, meaning that they primarily feed on dead and decaying things, although this is not always their exclusive source of sustenance with some bees still consuming some plant derived meals.

Have Corpse Eating Bees Always Existed?

Vulture bees have evolved fairly recently from ancestors that consumed pollen. This begs the question: how and why did they switch their diets so drastically? In order to make such a drastic change in their digestion, there must have been an alteration to the microbiomes in their guts. According to scientists, all bee species of current day are believed to be descended from a single common ancestor species which had 5 different major microbes in its gut. Today, most bees still have these 5 microbes however vulture bees do not. Instead, they both lack some of the original microbes and have some new ones that have developed for specifically digesting meat, giving them this unique corpse-eating ability.

Citations

The Bees That Eat Corpses (2022) YouTube. SciShow. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AOxUS8kjko (Accessed: January 20, 2022).